Fair use question about downloading financial data to use in charts

[johnoh]

I've been reading about fair use and and hoping to get clarification please.

I want to have a website that discusses macroeconomic trends, and will include charts that I create using spreadsheets. I get the data for those spreadsheets by downloading it from the internet from sites like yahoo, spindices, the federal reserve, etc. The type of data is various: stock prices, revenue data, market cap data, employment, auto sales, etc. Sometimes these sites have notes under their data such as "data is copyrighted, do not use without permission".

Does "fair use" apply to me if I just take their data and make a chart out of it without permission, in order to comment on it or make a point about the economy? My website (also twitter account) will not be for profit, its more of a blog. I suppose if a miracle happens and my site gets popular, maybe it becomes commercial, but not at first for sure.

Thank you. I'm in California, if that matters

 

[FlyingRon]

It's not even a fair use issue. Data can not be copyrighted. If all you're talking about is taking things like commodity and stock prices and formatting it in your presentation, YAHOO doesn't own those numbers and you're free to use them (even if youlearned them from yahoo's site). WHat you can't do is take their analsys (text), graphs, etc... and put them on your site.

 

[quincy]

I've been reading about fair use and and hoping to get clarification please.

I want to have a website that discusses macroeconomic trends, and will include charts that I create using spreadsheets. I get the data for those spreadsheets by downloading it from the internet from sites like yahoo, spindices, the federal reserve, etc. The type of data is various: stock prices, revenue data, market cap data, employment, auto sales, etc. Sometimes these sites have notes under their data such as "data is copyrighted, do not use without permission".

Does "fair use" apply to me if I just take their data and make a chart out of it without permission, in order to comment on it or make a point about the economy? My website (also twitter account) will not be for profit, its more of a blog. I suppose if a miracle happens and my site gets popular, maybe it becomes commercial, but not at first for sure.

Thank you. I'm in California, if that matters

Although what you are interested in doing appears to be a legal use of content found on other sites, without seeing exactly what you are taking and how it is being presented, I would not want to commit to saying it violates no laws.

In other words, although FlyingRon is correct in what he said, there can be trademark laws and some copyright issues that could come into play.

If you plan to invest a lot of time and energy into developing your website, you should also invest some money in an attorney who can personally review your website plans.

 

[johnoh]

In another thread it says this: "Raw, factual data cannot be copyrighted. What can be copyrighted is unique and original presentations. That does not apply to data in plain vanilla tabular form. But you must be careful about copying any presentation item that is "unique." Also, if the data has been aggregated, massaged, or worked up in any non-standard way, that may be copyrightable.

The italicized part is exactly what I am doing to the raw tabular data I find.


----------------------------------------

But here's what got me thinking about this, for an employment report on the FRED federal reserve site it says

"Data in this graph are copyrighted. Please review the copyright information in the series notes before sharing...
NOTES
Source: Automatic Data Processing, Inc.
Release: ADP National Employment Report
Copyright, 2016, Automatic Data Processing, Inc."

EDIT: was advised to remove links in this post, so did so

 

[quincy]

In the below link/thread it says this: "Raw, factual data cannot be copyrighted. What can be copyrighted is unique and original presentations. That does not apply to data in plain vanilla tabular form. But you must be careful about copying any presentation item that is "unique." Also, if the data has been aggregated, massaged, or worked up in any non-standard way, that may be copyrightable.

The italicized part is exactly what I am doing to the raw tabular data I find.

XXX
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But here's what got me thinking about this, in the below link it says

"Data in this graph are copyrighted. Please review the copyright information in the series notes before sharing... XXX
...

Attributing quotes on this forum is good but links to commercial sites is not good.

Although facts cannot be copyrighted, databases and compilations of facts can be.

How facts are expressed can be copyrightable. The selections of facts and how they have been collected and arranged are all cooyrightable.

That is why I suggested you have your plans personally reviewed. There are rarely clear cut, yes and no answers in law. A small change in one fact can make a legal use illegal.

You can also go to the "legal permission" pages of the sites from which you want to take data and communicate directly with the legal teams.

Edit to add: I just noticed in your first post that you intend to download content from the sites that have copyright notices posted. Don't do that.

 

[johnoh]

I just noticed in your first post that you intend to download content from the sites. Don't do that.

When I said download I meant clicking on the button on each of these sites that says "Download raw data here", and then it prompts you, do you want the tabular data to be downloaded in csv format, or an excel spreadsheet, whatever.

 

[quincy]

When I said download I meant clicking on the button on each of these sites that says "Download raw data here", and then it prompts you, do you want the tabular data to be downloaded in csv format, or an excel spreadsheet, whatever.

All right. Federal reserve data, okay. That is in the public domain. I question downloads from Yahoo or from any site that has "all rights reserved" or a similar copyright notice.

 

[FlyingRon]

Although facts cannot be copyrighted, databases and compilations of facts can be.

Well, there still needs to be some creative act in the aggregation. The simple aggregation or compilation doesn't create a copyrightable work. This was decided decades ago with things like telephone directories.

 

[quincy]

Well, there still needs to be some creative act in the aggregation. The simple aggregation or compilation doesn't create a copyrightable work. This was decided decades ago with things like telephone directories.

Right. In Feist Publications Inc. v. Rural Telephone Service Co., 499 US 340 (1991), the US Supreme Court held that copyright protects only original and creative expression but does not protect the labor that goes into collecting data.

Phone books are facts that are in the public domain and are arranged alphabetically so there is nothing original or creative about the facts or expression. To protect phone books under copyright law, phone book publishers now add creative elements (photos, quotes, boxes, colors) to make them distinguishable from all others. So, while the facts (names, phone numbers and addresses) can still be used by anyone, pages from the phone books cannot be printed off and copied without infringement.

What can be copyright-protected in databases, in other words, will be original selections and arrangements of the facts/data. A database listing earliest to latest models of Ford Mustangs is probably not protectable. These are facts with no originality. A database listing earliest to latest models of Ford Mustangs with creative photos of the vehicles or with famous owners of each listed by each model would be.